Independent Lens - "Lives Worth Living"

Updated Fri, Oct 28, 2011 9:39 am

Independent Lens - "Lives Worth Living"

Thursday, Oct. 27, 10 p.m.

Fred Fay’s life proves that one man can change the world, even though he has to lie flat on his back just to stay alive. “Lives Worth Living” looks at Fay’s struggle to survive after a spinal cord injury and the small group of dedicated activists who formed the disability rights movement to drive the nation toward equal rights.

While there are close to 50 million Americans living with disabilities, “Lives Worth Living” is the first television history of their decades-long struggle for equal rights. Produced and directed by Eric Neudel, “Lives Worth Living” is a window into a world inhabited by people with an unwavering determination to live their lives like everyone else, and a look back into a past when millions of Americans lived without access to schools, apartment buildings, and public transportation – a way of life unimaginable today. “Lives Worth Living” premieres on the Emmy® Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens, on Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 10 PM.

“Lives Worth Living” traces the development of the disability rights movement from its beginning following World War II, when thousands of disabled veterans returned home, through its burgeoning in the 1960s and 1970s, when it began to adopt the tactics of other social movements. Told through interviews with the movement’s pioneers, legislators, and others, “Lives Worth Living” explores how Americans with a wide variety of disabilities — including the blind, deaf, mentally, and physically challenged — banded together to change public perception and policy. Through demonstrations and legislative battles, the disability rights community finally secured equal civil rights with the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, one of the most transformative pieces of civil rights legislation in American history.